Summer of Code/2009/Robots

About you

• What is your name?

Rafael Ortiz

• What is your email address?

dirakx---gmail

• What is your Sugar Labs wiki username?

RafaelOrtiz

• What is your IRC nickname?

dirakx

• What is your primary language? (We have mentors who speak multiple languages and can match you with one of them if you'd prefer.)

Spanish-English

• Where are you located, and what hours do you tend to work? (We also try to match mentors by general time zone if possible.)

Bogota,Colombia

• Have you participated in an open-source project before? If so, please send us URLs to your profile pages for those projects, or some other demonstration of the work that you have done in open-source. If not, why do you want to work on an open-source project this summer?

http://wiki.debian.org/RafaelOrtiz, http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:RafaelOrtiz

About your project

• What is the name of your project? Robots

• Describe your project in 10-20 sentences. What are you making? Who are you making it for, and why do they need it? What technologies (programming languages, etc.) will you be using?

The main idea is to make an activity that helps children learn programing robots,and that can provide a platform to help children learn about cybernetics The scope of the proposal for gsoc would be generating a GUI for emulating different kinds of robots, after gsoc period, focus would be interaction of Robots with the physical world. i.e controlling physical robots with the code made by emulation.

The theory of this proposal are in one of Marvin Minsky's essays, specially this one

• http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Education_and_Psychology

Teaching Cybernetics instead of Psychology

'All this suggests that our ideas about psychology are still developing so rapidly that it wouldn’t make sense for us to select any current “theory of thinking” to teach. So instead, we’ll propose a different approach: to provide our children with ideas they could use to invent their own theories about themselves! The rest of this essay will suggest that such ideas could come from engaging children in projects that involve making machines that have ‘lifelike’ behaviors. Such projects would engage and integrate many concepts that we separately treat today, in Physics, Biology, and Mathematics—and in Social Studies, Psychology, and Economics—along with other important principles that don’t fit into any of those traditional subjects.

A flood of new concepts about what machines could do began to emerge in the 1940s, from research in the field called Cybernetics—which soon then led to other fields called Control Theory, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Cognitive Psychology. Each of those new sciences brought hosts of new ideas about how to build systems that actually do some of the things we use ‘thinking’ to do. So now, in the spirit of Seymour Papert’s “constructionism,” we can enable our children to experiment with networks composed of collections of parts that support many sorts of knowledge-based processes. 10 This is important because that’s what we are'

• What is the timeline for development of your project? The Summer of Code work period is 7 weeks long, May 23 - August 10; tell us what you will be working on each week. (As the summer goes on, you and your mentor will adjust your schedule, but it's good to have a plan at the beginning so you have an idea of where you're headed.) Note that you should probably plan to have something "working and 90% done" by the midterm evaluation (July 6-13); the last steps always take longer than you think, and we will consider cancelling projects which are not mostly working by then.

Week 1: Week 2: Week 3: Week 4: Week 5: Week 6: Week 7:

• Convince us, in 5-15 sentences, that you will be able to successfully complete your project in the timeline you have described. This is usually where people describe their past experiences, credentials, prior projects, schoolwork, and that sort of thing, but be creative. Link to prior work or other resources as relevant.

You and the community

• If your project is successfully completed, what will its impact be on the Sugar Labs community? Give 3 answers, each 1-3 paragraphs in length. The first one should be yours. The other two should be answers from members of the Sugar Labs community, at least one of whom should be a Sugar Labs GSoC mentor. Provide email contact information for non-GSoC mentors.

• Sugar Labs will be working to set up a small (5-30 unit) Sugar pilot near each student project that is accepted to GSoC so that you can immediately see how your work affects children in a deployment. We will make arrangements to either supply or find all the equipment needed. Do you have any ideas on where you would like your deployment to be, who you would like to be involved, and how we can help you and the community in your area begin it?

• What will you do if you get stuck on your project and your mentor isn't around?

• How do you propose you will be keeping the community informed of your progress and any problems or questions you might have over the course of the project?

Miscellaneous

• We want to make sure that you can set up a development environment before the summer starts.

• What is your t-shirt size? (Yes, we know Google asks for this already; humor us.)

• Describe a great learning experience you had as a child.

• Is there anything else we should have asked you or anything else that we should know that might make us like you or your project more

There is an initial work on http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Peripherals/Robots